THE A N WYORl: E ) '- " :: m . / ..... "" II .,, II /" __ j '- rÞ :: ...:: fro .JÞ .. . 0 - ' '''' '\ 0 0 · - '" , 4ii1 - 1\" I \ \ \ . 1\ . o .,. . ",. THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment T HE Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi, who died last month, at the age of sixty- seven, wrote some years ago about his first experience in a laboratory. The story, called "Hydrogen," was an early chapter in Levi's memoir "The Periodic Table," in which each chapter is named for the element it recalls: ceri urn he'd encountered in Auschwitz, iron he'd found in the mountains outside his native Turin, and so on. He told the hydrogen story by way of a joke on himself-his young self mostly, though every so often he seemed to be telling the story on his grown self, too. In 1935, when Levi was sixteen and first chemistry- smitten, he and a more down-to-earth school friend got themselves into an older brother's makeshift but off-limits lab. After fiddling around awhile with the dusty Bunsen burner, the two spent a concentrated hour feinting at glassblowing: "Even the slightest puff of breath in excess and the walls took on the iridescence of a soap bubble [ until the glass] burst with a sharp lit- tle snap and its fragments were scat- tered over the floor with the tenuous rustle of eggshells." Then they turned to something more satisfyingly chemical, and more certain in its re- sults: the electrolytic proof of the elemental proportions of water. Levi assembled the ingredients-a dry bat- tery, two empty jam jars upside down . . .. , .. : '...... . A ..... .. ;' t'" - ,, ... U ..J{ .l.....JL ;:"'"Lt.Ju'-,a J. r,r. t1:"" . t:l!:l:O ..,.. in a beaker of water, a pinch of salt- and the experiment was set in motion. "I wrote the well-known equation on the blackboard," Levi recalled, "and eXplained to Enrico that what was written there was actually taking place." The next day, one of the jam jars, half full ("in pliant obsequious- ness to theory"), held oxygen; the other, filled up, contained hydrogen- but this Levi's school friend stubbornly disbelieved: "Now we shall see," I said: I carefully lifted the cathode jar and, holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher), and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic sym- bol, th glass ring of the bottom. It was this-the sound of glass breaking, the boys' astonishment at the lawfully reacting gas-that came to our mind at the news of Levi's death. "The authorities said they were treat- ing the death as a suicide," the Times reported, and the story went on to say that Levi had recently had minor sur- gery, and that "friends suggested he was deeply troubled about the condi- tion of his 92-year-old mother, who was partially paralyzed by a stroke last year." W e also remembered a passage from "Survival in Auschwitz"-Levi's first book, written a year or so after the war-in which he discussed analyti- cally the various inhabitants of the German Lager, or prison camp, ., where he had spent eleven months. In the passage we recalled, he wrote of the distinction made between those prisoners commonly known as Musel- männer ("This word 'Muselmann,' I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection," he said in a footnote) and everyone else-the drowned and the saved, he called them. He wrote: This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is nor- mally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbours; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, every- one is normally in possession of such spiri- tual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exer- cised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civi- lized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becom- ing too weak or a powerful one too power- ful. But Ln th Lager things are different. When we first heard of Primo Levi's death, it seemed to us that there could be no plausible explanation for it, and, of course, no one could say with certainty why, having survived the Lager forty-some years ago, he would choose death now. It was Levi, after all, who assembled on paper those cool, light, and passionate words- -' )>- - ' 'J (R c:w O'V\....